ICON OF THE BEAUTY

PART III

RANDOM ICON

random icon ( The third part of the Icon of The Beauty project )is a kind of random game. It is based on playing with iconicity, with a dominant way of generating iconic images, especially in the pop-culture world. Each time a series of four pictures is chosen at random from among photos signed with successive numbers. Then one of the pictures (also chosen at random) is to gain the icon position. “Iconicity” means here the ability of an image to circulate (independently from both gender and beauty standards) as a pattern, its ability to penetrate other images. And yet, such a circulation would be impossible without a paradoxical element, which represents the whole and, simultaneously, puts it into question. This element – at the same time constitutive for an image of a face (having the power of expression) and manifesting an anarchic strive for autonomy – can be eyes or lips. The pop-culture icon is a product, which (after the target-group has been defined and the basic risk estimated) follows the market demand-and-supply rules, as well as the specific rules of mass-reproduction. However, random icon emerges by chance or (like the color of our eyes) depends on the laws of probability, on statistical, stochastic mechanisms. The circulation of iconic element always brings minimal differences which destabilize other images; and so, it looses its own identity. It brings out a certain “pleasure of difference”, as well as a narcissistic satisfaction given to a person seeing such a “triumph” of his/her own image, a propagation and propaganda of his/her own. This satisfaction is something you can not inevitable, even if the very “property” of a paradoxical element turns out to be somewhat doubtful …